"We're going nowhere!" Garrus raised his arms and let them fall, the gesture somehow made threatening by those talon-shaped fingers.

"That is not true, Garrus." EDI's voice was too calm for the room. Instead it acted as a pressure, a brush of a touch – rubbed the wrong way. "My navigation systems are fully functional."

"Shut up, EDI."

Even if she wasn't physically present in the room, Kaidan waved a hand to silence her. The glow emanating from his palms threw shifting, watery shadows on the walls of the mess hall.

"Hey, cool it, Blue!"

The comment earned Vega a bright glare, but the name was fitting. No brown showed through Kaidan's eyes – the blue suffused him, surrounded him in a rolling wave. But it was primarily directed at Garrus, and so to Garrus it returned.

"Don't test me, Vakarian. You won't like what you get."

"Oh?" Garrus' exhale could have been a growl. "I just think that you might actually get us somewhere if you took a second and got your head out of your ass."

"That's it!" The wave erupted, moving forward with a terrifying rush that hit Garrus full force. It would have knocked him against the bulkhead, and given the shaking in Kaidan's hands, could have caused a few new dents in the hull.

But it didn't. Instead, Garrus stopped short and floated suspended in the air. Surprised silence fell. Waited.

A door hissed closed and deliberate footsteps stomped echoes along the short hallway from the old XO quarters with an eldritch indigo light as their portent.

Liara did not look amused.

"This is how you deal with things?" she asked. The breathy notes of her voice turned sour. "This is how you cope? After all this time?"

As Liara advanced on Kaidan, Garrus found himself released and lightly set on his feet. He took a moment, eyes shifting between human and asari and the now-seemingly endless walk down to the hall to the main battery. He jerked a chin to Vega and set off in that direction, disregarding the clamp his feet made on the floor. James followed, but turians could make great strides given the proper motivation. In a moment, the mess hall was empty.

The asari stopped just short of Alenko's nose and forced him to take a step back, to rebalance, though his biotic aura didn't fade.

"We have all lived through this war. Somehow. All of us have seen its horrors and were changed by them. All of us are thinking day and night about what's left of our worlds. Of the people we care about. And how far away they are right now." Her arm gestured back in the general direction of Thessia, getting further away as they left the Silean Nebula well behind. "We're putting more distance from each of our homes to get to Earth and - " her momentum faltered. Slowed.

"We're all tired, Kaidan," she sighed as she stepped back. Any glow remaining on her hands dissipated as she laid her forehead on tapered fingertips.

Kaidan exhaled a long-held breath and dropped into a chair, once again only human and not looking forward to the headache that his outburst was going to cause.

"I'm sorry." No one else he needed to apologize to was here anymore, but Liara was a good start. With nearly a year passed since their crash, tempers had worn through until nothing was left but holes. So much was still unknown - they had not received communications from the worlds they passed, no Reapers were evident, but the state of the war or its outcome was still a guess. The only conclusions that they could draw up to now were poor ones, both in quality and in tone. With the likelihood of a few more years of travel before they reached Earth, this was not the first anniversary they all wanted.

With the biotics gone from the room, the walls were again blank metal and fiber, catching and throwing back the low light scattered around the hall. From a space that buzzed with energy a moment ago, it now seemed like a great place, and a great time, for rest.

"Hey, Major," Joker's voice broke in over their heads, "Hell, everyone, you're going to want to see this."